Search results for " modal particles"

The translatability into Italian of the German stance marking modal particles wohl, eben and ja. Between epistemicity and evidentiality

2015

Contrary to Italian and many other languages, German has a linguistic means to mark the speaker’s stance: the so-called modal particles, such as wohl, eben and ja. This paper examines their occurrence in a German novel and their possible translations in its Italian version. It analyses their complex meaning arising from the intertwined relations between speaker – hearer – state of affairs as the three key entities of stance they mark and the textual or situational context, concluding that they have only covert epistemic and evidential features. This cross-linguistic analysis proves that it is impossible not only to translate them, but also to draw a clear borderline between epistemicity and…

DENN, EIGENTLICH, ÜBERHAUPT - THREE “PRAGMATIC PARTICLES” IN GERMAN

2015

A peculiarity of the German language is the extensive use of “pragmatic particles” in spoken language. These particles are generally called Abtönungspartikel (“modulating particles”) and are used to modulate the speaker’s attitude. They have an elusive meaning which is quite difficult for non-native speakers to discern, and they are a challenge to translate into Italian due to the lack of equivalents. Three particularly interesting particles are “denn”, “eigentlich” and “überhaupt”, which are typical of the speech act of asking questions. After a general introduction to the vast field of conversational particles (showing how differently German grammars treat this topic), the present contrib…

Modality and Injunctive in Homeric Greek: the case of counterfactual and epistemic constructions

Homeric unaugmented aorists and imperfects are the oldest verbal forms attested in Greek, which continue the so-called Indo-European ‘injunctives’. The latter were inflectionally underspecified as regards verbal categories such as tense or mood (Hoffmann 1967; Kiparsky 1968). Thus, the question arises as to how the attitude of the speaker towards the content of his utterance was expressed. The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of epistemic particles co-occurring with injunctives in the Iliad and the Odyssey, focusing in particular on past counterfactual constructions. Crosslinguistic studies have shown that such modal constructions reflect the universal semantic distinction betwe…

The expression of additivity in the Alps: German auch, Italian anche and their counterparts in Gardenese Ladin

2019

Additive particles (e.g. English also) usually operate on a constituent (‘domain of association’) signaling that it has to be added to a list of items already introduced in the context or inferable. In addition, they can also exhibit a more grammatical function acting as a focused constituent itself or a modal particle. In the present contribution, we aim to provide a classification of the usage patterns and main grammatical functions of the additive item also in the standard languages spoken in the alpine region of Trentino-South Tyrol, i.e. German (auch) and Italian (anche) and in a regional language, Gardenese Ladin (belonging to the Rhaeto-romance group), which displays two forms: nce a…